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For more than a decade, starting nearly 20 years ago, I believed that I would never need to think about buying sneakers again. When I needed new sneakers, I simply went to a suitable shoe store and found a pair of Jack Purcells, size 12, a clean white replica of the dirty and fraying shoes I’d worn into the store.

The badminton champion Jack Purcell had designed them in the 1930s: plain canvas, long rows of metal eyelets, a white rubber cap toe, a flat blue sole, and a correspondingly flat canvas insole. The shoe had survived through whole epochs of modern shoe design, secure in its atavistic simplicity, like a horseshoe crab. It was handsome and comfortable.

Then, a few years ago, the shoes were gone. In their place was something that almost looked like them — cap toe, eyelets, canvas — but, in the words of the manufacturer Converse, had been “reinvented with a 1/2-inch thick comfort insole, lightly padded tongue and upper sockliner . . . along with a redesigned outsole for added comfort.”

Whose comfort? There were already plenty of sneakers out there with padded soles and tongues; if I’d wanted them, I would have bought them. In the name of making the shoes better, they had made them into something else. The Jack Purcell sneaker had been improved out of existence.

There are plenty of criticisms of American consumer capitalism and its guiding ideology, the notion that the Invisible Hand of the Market is as all-capable as the hand of God, only more helpful and efficient. It’s not hard to spot cases where the market is inadequate to answer moral or ethical questions, such as how to pay to fix an 83-year-old retiree’s broken hip.

But consumer capitalism is also a disappointment at the thing it’s supposed to be good at: the ordinary buying and using of stuff. It’s especially frustrating when the market decides to improve something that customers didn’t want improved. If the consumer marketplace allows useful, effective products to disappear, then what is it good for? Or who is it good for? Not the person who’s buying.

This sort of ruination-through-improvement has a rich history. The most notorious example was the introduction of New Coke, when Coca-Cola announced it was replacing its ubiquitous, wildly popular flagship beverage — an avatar of American capitalist culture around the world — with a new version that people would like better. No one wanted New Coke, and it was quickly withdrawn, to be remembered as a humiliating failure.

What’s mostly forgotten, though, is that old-fashioned Coca-Cola never came back. What replaced New Coke was a drink called Coca-Cola Classic — made, like New Coke, with cheaper and more cloying high-fructose corn syrup in place of cane sugar. Now, people who care enough to want the actual, white-sugar taste of Coke end up hunting for foreign bottlings or hoarding the corn-free Passover version.

Things like New Coke are meant to make things easier or more profitable for the producer, which are presented to the consumer as improvements. As Facebook grows from a social-networking site to a data-mining site for marketers, the home page becomes a gabble of personality quizzes taken by people you haven’t seen since high school. The bait-and-switch is crude and obvious.

More insidious are the disimprovements through which the producer genuinely believes it’s making its product more attractive. Why, one day in the ’90s, did a capering anthropomorphic paper clip start jumping out at you when you tried to write a letter in Microsoft Word? Why did a particular brand of toilet paper — and in short order, nearly every brand of toilet paper — turn crumbly and linty in the name of “extra softness”? Why does the first “Star Wars” movie now teem with swarms of excess spaceships, computer-pasted onto the original scenes?

When a product gets disimproved, the company behind it is trying to give you more — but not you, personally, exactly. Someone else, some other person, who still must be wooed. The satisfied customer, his or her needs having already been accounted for, can be dispensed with; it’s the dissatisfied customer, who still wants to buy things, who makes the system run. The moment you’re comfortable enough to stop thinking about your choice is the moment your choice is most likely to be yanked away from you.

Sometimes the market really will correct itself, as the economists promise, reversing a disimprovement, or even coming up with an improvement. If you pay a little extra when buying a Windows computer, they’ll strip out the Vista operating system and let you have a plain, older version.

But mostly, unwanted progress is here to stay. The market can’t be trusted to keep supplying you with what you like, because the goal of the market is not to have sold things but to be selling more things, tomorrow. It’s not about the loyal customer, but the one whose loyalty still needs to be negotiated — on new terms, if need be. The loyalty of the old customers is strictly one-way. The ideal customer is someone who doesn’t want the product.

Tom Scocca is working on a new book, “Beijing Welcomes You” (Riverhead Books).